by Daniel Pipes*

The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Muhammad’s life, Goldziher established, the hadith emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.

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A briefing by Robert Spencer*

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, has released a new book titled, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. On April 24^th, Mr. Spencer spoke on his book at a joint meeting of the Middle East Forum and Gatestone Institute in New York City.

Did the Prophet Muhammad really exist, or was he a sacred myth fashioned by the Koran decades after his purported death? Robert Spencer has addressed this thorny question with a dual intent:

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Considering Egypt’s presidential elections take place later this month, last weekend’s Islamist clash with the military could not have come at a worse time.

First, the story: due to overall impatience—and rage that the Salafi presidential candidate, Abu Ismail, was disqualified (several secular candidates were also disqualified)—emboldened Islamists began to gather around the Defense Ministry in Abbassia, Cairo, late last week, chanting jihadi slogans, and preparing for a “million man” protest for Friday, May 4^th.

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by Nidra Poller*

The play within the play

In October 2011 an extraordinary opportunity to apprehend the ill-defined “Middle East” conflict was offered in the form of a play within the play. Discourse was disabled by flesh and blood images acting out the drama with exquisite unity and perfect casting. Playing the role of Israel, Gilad Shalit, courageous survivor of five years of unspeakable deprivation, emerged frail, pale but gloriously resistant. The little that we know of the conditions of his imprisonment is already too much. Kidnapped at the age of 19 near the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel (two IDF soldiers were killed in the cross-border attack), held in some sort of dungeon, starved of human company, starved of daylight, undernourished, not even given eyeglasses with which to see the ugly contours of his constricted world, Gilad stood before us, a miraculous survivor. The celestial light of dignity suffused his flesh and bones with metaphysical force.

What decent human being would not have misgivings about the release, in exchange for Shalit, of 1027 murderers, thieves, and thugs determined to use their liberation as a license to renew the persecution of Israeli Jews? And who could not feel, seeing the first images of Gilad roughly handled by Hamas and Egyptian intermediaries, that no price was too dear for the release of one single human being from the tomb in which he was jailed and left to slowly extinguish like a flame without oxygen.

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By Barry Rubin

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

– William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”

Whatever side you are, or aren’t, on and whether you never think about these issues or are an impassioned activist, there are three fundamental issues about Israel, its enemies, and the Middle East that tie the narrative into knots.

Each of these wrong ideas, of course, has a basis in fact. The following points might appear counter-intuitive. But I will demonstrate their accuracy. And you can’t understand events without grasping them.

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By Barry Rubin

While you probably already know what I’m about to say, it is useful to reinforce and pull together the pieces of reality we face.

It is the year 2012, which seems to be going by very fast and is already one-fourth finished. People are walking around with smart phones and all sorts of electronic devices undreamed of not long ago. There has been what is called an “Arab Spring” stoking fantasies about instant democracy. An African-American was elected president of the United States, and that was after his party’s nomination, and thus probably the White House, almost went to a woman!

Times have changed.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Phillip Smyth*

A recurring question of the past year has been whether Israel can come out of the unrest of the “Arab Spring” with any new allies. The point is hardly immaterial: The future of Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt hangs in the balance, as Egyptian political parties call for a referendum on the Camp David Accords. Observers also point to the possibility of a revolt against Hashemite rule in Amman instigated by Bedouin tribes and/or Palestinians in Jordan. This too could derail that country’s peace treaty with Israel.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

Commenting on the recent massacre of 17 Afghan civilians that was allegedly carried out by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Glenn Greenwald, a leading pundit on the American political left, wrote the following:

There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type, there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible, something other than an act of pure hatred or evil. When a Muslim engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another manifestation of inscrutable hatred and evil, and any discussion of any other causes must be prohibited and ignored.

This is a typical example of how Greenwald engages in overblown rhetoric. To take just a couple of examples that refute his inaccurate generalizations here, no one attempted to rationalize the Mahmudiyah killings in 2006, which involved the massacre of an Iraqi family — including the gang rape and killing of a 14-year old girl — by some U.S. soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment.

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by David J. Rusin*

Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, sparked a firestorm last month when he praised Western values as “superior” to the oppressive ones found elsewhere, namely the Islamic world. Yet the controversy did more to spotlight an area in which the West clearly trails its rivals: self-confidence. If a government official cannot extol the unique virtues of freedom and equality that define Western life without being cast as a bigot by the politically correct, how can they be safeguarded against the highly motivated forces of Islamism, which doubt neither the superiority of their own principles nor the righteousness of imposing them on others?

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By Alexander Maistrovoy

An Arab/Muslim caliphate is not a figment of the imagination anymore: Fragments of Middle Eastern regimes will soon form a group of islands called “The Muslim Archipelago.”

“A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.” These were the first words of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. More than a century later a different specter has appeared on the threshold of the Old World — the specter of an Islamic Caliphate. (Ed. note: “Caliphate, the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death [ad 632] of the Prophet Muḥammad. …”)

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances.

Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances — primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is “technically” true.

Deceit and lying may be far more ingrained in the culture than previously thought.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

One year after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt, what conclusions can we draw regarding the ongoing wave of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa?

Around this time last year at the Herzliya Conference, the Israeli historian Prof. Martin Kramer lambasted the Obama administration for taking the view that the “status quo” in the region was no longer sustainable, and even went so far as to accuse the U.S. government of “throwing Mubarak under the bus.”

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Is the problem Islam or Islamism? Muslims or Islamists?

These and related questions regularly foster debate (see the exchange between Robert Spencer and Andrew McCarthy for a recent example). The greatest obstacle on the road to consensus is what such words imply; namely, that Islamism and Islamists are “bad,” and Islam and Muslims are good (or simply neutral).

Some observations in this regard:

Islamism is a distinct phenomenon and, to an extent, different from historic Islam. The staunch literalness of today’s Islamists is so artificial and anachronistic that, if only in this way, it contradicts the practices of medieval Muslims, which often came natural and better fit their historical context.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Iran is quickly becoming the cause celebre and darling of the Left. On a Canadian campus I recently listened to Zafar Bangash, director of the Islamic Society of York Region, make an outrageous defense of Iran and scathing attack on Western civilization — Imperialism, according to Bangash, is the greatest problem in the world, Iran, however, has been assigned favourite victim status by Bangash. He was being sponsored by leftist groups, Islamic students, a Jewish anti-Israel group called Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), and the “Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War.” That last group concentrates on only one country for very special critical treatment — Israel.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Although many Muslim leaders openly articulate their efforts as part of a larger picture — one that culminates in the resurrection of a caliphate adversarial by nature to all things non-Muslim — many Western leaders see only the moment, either out of context or, worse, in a false context built atop wishful thinking.

Among other things, this myopia causes virtually all Western politicians to overlook long-term threats and focus exclusively on violence and terror, the tangible and temporal — those things that may coincide with their tenure.

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